Narratives of addiction : savage usury / Kevin McCarron.
McCarron, Kevin, author.
2021
PN171.S83 M33 2021
Available Online

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Title Narratives of addiction : savage usury / Kevin McCarron.
Author McCarron, Kevin, author.
ISBN 9783030884611 (electronic bk.)
3030884619 (electronic bk.)
9783030884604
3030884600
DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88461-1
Published Cham, Switzerland : Palgrave Macmillan, [2021]
Language English
Description 1 online resource (1 volume)
Other Standard Identifiers 10.1007/978-3-030-88461-1 doi
Call Number PN171.S83 M33 2021
Dewey Decimal Classification 809.3561
Summary Narratives of Addiction: Savage Usury is the first book to argue, in the face of more than a centurys received wisdom, that drug addiction and alcoholism are undoubtedly evidence of individual moral flaws. However, the sense of morality that underlies this book is completely severed from Christianity. Instead, it is influenced in particular by the writings of the nineteenth-century German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Frederick Nietzsche, both of whom insisted that a genuine morality was actually incompatible with Christianity. The sequence of chapters moves from addictions on the streets, into rehab clinics, and finally into the meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous. This is the first book to argue that the search for pleasure drives alcoholism and drug addiction and not the numbing of pain. Throughout the book I reject the claims of the medical profession, as embodied by the American Medical Association, that drug addiction and alcoholism are diseases, and further argue that they do not have the authority to tell hundreds of millions of Americans that addiction is not a moral failing. I also query throughout the book the claims of neuroscience, psychology, and the social sciences that addictions to alcohol and drugs are attributable to causes that their specific disciplines are best suited to understand. I argue that there is nothing complex about addiction: it is a simple behavioural disorder. It is the language routinely employed to discuss addiction that is not complex, just confused, and so it is also the rhetoric of addiction discourse, especially its use of simile, metaphor and euphemism, that this book evaluates. Dr Kevin McCarron is the author of two previous monographs: William Golding, and The Coincidence of Opposites, and a co-author of Frightening Fiction. He worked as a stand-up comedian for many years. He has published forty chapters in edited collections and nineteen peer-reviewed journal articles on a range of subjects including The Dead Sea Scrolls, university teaching and stand-up comedy, blasphemy, prison narratives, tattooing, prostitution, alcoholism and heroin addiction, begging and homelessness, and the Marquis de Sade.
Bibliography, etc. Note Includes bibliographical references and index.
Access Note Access limited to authorized users.
Source of Description Description based on print version record.
Available in Other Form Narratives of addiction.
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Chapter 1: Define Your Terms
Chapter 2: Language and Addiction
Chapter 3: Morality and Addiction
Chapter 4: Philosophy and Addiction
Chapter 5: The Streets and Addiction
Chapter 6: Prostitution and Addiction
Chapter 7: Rehabilitation Clinics and Addiction
Chapter 8: The Rooms: Alcoholics Anonymous
Chapter 9: Works Cited
Index.

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